Requesting good DDR4 overclocking guide

[Qwinn]

Hello all. Been googling for a decent beginner's guide to overclocking RAM and not having much luck. They all either assume too much knowledge, or are only interested in getting XMP settings working, or whatnot.

I consider myself fairly proficient in O/Cing CPU core clock, CPU cache and GPU's, but I haven't even tried O/Cing RAM yet. At this point I'm willing to give it a quick shot and see if I can get 3200 Mhz for little effort, and hoping for some tips on that.

Right now, I have a G.Skill 32GB kit (4x8GB) running at XMP settings of 2666 Mhz, 15-15-15-35-2T. I suspect I could probably get better results by tightening timings instead of just going for raw frequency, but the learning curve on how to play with those seems pretty steep. So I'm wondering if I can't just bump up voltage from 1.2 to 1.35, set it to 3200Mhz, and possibly work right off the bat. Is that unlikely? Do I need to change the primary timings to something like 16-16-18-36-2T first?

Again, I'm not looking to become a master RAM overclocker, because from all I'm reading it won't give me too much of a boost in anything I'm likely to do other than benchmarks. Just looking to see if my sticks are strong enough to take a quick-and-easy boost to 3200 Mhz. If it takes much more than an hour of tweaking, I'd probably just quit trying at that point.

If someone's willing to give me a basic "Plug these numbers in for getting from 2666 to 3200 and see if it works" tutorial, I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

[drop4205]

For ram take xmp off and set to manual. Input dram voltages, timings and speed of 2666. Test for stability. If stable go back in bios and up the voltage to 1.35 and speed to 3000mhz and test for stability. Running ram at 2666 is overclocked a bit. I got my 2666 ram up to 3200mhz but had some stability issues and have settled for 3000mhz 1.35v and stock timings for now. Arne may chime in as he has tightened his timings and running 1t. Gskill is nice ram

[Qwinn]

Drop, you running 125 strap or 100? I am 100, which is why i picked 3200. I intend to stay on 100 too, as I like adaptive voltage.

[samboy87]

im sitting in the same curve trying to learn clocking ram aswell. i'm on 3000mhz with timings on 14-14-14-34 2T now with 1.355v stable. it needed 0.005v more to hold 16gb of ram stable with those timings

[Arne Saknussemm]

First thing I'd do is drop from 2T to 1T and see if that runs stable...

Then copy down first second and third timings from XMP and take a note of VCCSA that the board is setting....post that up here if you like.

If 1T works...try to go to 3000 back at 2T and 1.35v DRAMvoltage...leave everything else at XMP values...see if it boots and runs SPi32M

There is no way I'm a RAM expert...just have put in a lot of time playing with timings one by one and testing with AIDA to see what gets better what gets worse....and know a few targets to head for timing wise...

[drop4205]

Running 100 strap. Cpu daily at 4.5

[Qwinn]

Ok thanks for tips guys. Here's how it's going. I had tried going to 1T a while back without changing voltage or anything else and that didn't work, so i went on to the 3000 attempt. Here's my only issue so far: I was able to copy most of the XMP settings easily enough because it was the same value for all 4 channels, but there's three values that are different for each channel. How do I input those?

The 3 settings are:

tRWDR2: 7 6 6 5
tRWDD: 7 6 6 5
tRWSR2: 6 5 5 4

Those 4 numbers are under CHA A, CHA B, CHA C and CHA D respectively, but it doesn't seem like i can enter them individually.

I put in the largest number in each (so my tRWDR2 is now 7's all across, for example), and it's currently made it through 10 minutes of memtest86 which I'm just running to make sure I have a chance to get into windows without corrupting it. Will let it keep running until you guys let me know what i should do about those 3 settings.

Thanks for all the help!

[Qwinn]

Update: running 12 instances of hci memtest now, maximum of 2048mb each, so unfortunately some memory out of my 32gb is going untested but not sure what i can do about that. System agent appears unchanged at 0.880v. Gonna go to sleep and let it do its thing.

Oh, and my very first attempt was raising it to 3200, failed to boot with code bd. 3000 appears to be cooperating nicely tho. Surprising, i thought i'd read that 3200 was exceptionally strong on 100 strap.

[Arne Saknussemm]

tRWDR2: 7 6 6 5
tRWDD: 7 6 6 5
tRWSR2: 6 5 5 4

That is weird....I tell you XMP is for the birds...I got a kit yesterday that set CPU multiplier and cache...WTF? anyway


I would do what you have done but then try to reduce them to 6-6-5 and if that works 5-5-4 which is where I would think they should be...

[Qwinn]

Woke up to 400% coverage on all 12 instances with no errors. Went back to bios, set those 3 settings to 5-5-4, booted fine, started 12 instances again and went to work. Will let ya know what I come home to tonight. Thanks Arne!